Leo McKinstry
The Runway’s End
When the brilliant American general David Petraeus took charge of the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq in 2007, he issued a manual to his tactical commanders setting out the detailed plans for this surge. Tellingly, the US air force played little part in his scheme. Petraeus’s manual relegated airpower to an appendix that only took up five pages out of almost 2,000. The subsequent success of the operation, against all predictions, appeared to justify Petraeus’s wisdom in treating America’s air force almost as an irrelevance.
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties